Yesterday I took a tour at the Royal Palace and Temple of the Emerald Buddha. First of all, the Emerald Buddha is amazing! It is pure emerald, and about waist high. It's actually kind of hard to tell cuz it was pretty far away up on a big throne display. But in general the Royal Palace (which is where a couple of the past kings lived including Rama I but I don't remember exactly what others) is incredibly extravagant. Almost everything is coated in gold, or adorned with intricate gold patterning. There is this great mural painting in the outside walls of one of the buildings that depicts this long story about the battle between the demons and monkeys. I don't know anything about the story really, but the painting is amazing. I don't know if my pictures do any justice...(sorry the formatting sucks btw)
I met a really nice Pakistani family on my tour. The girl, Ayesha, is 19, studying environmental science. They are only in Thailand for 2 more days and then they are going to Malaysia, Singapore and back to Pakistan. She's on summer break for 3 months too! :-)
After the tour the guides took us to this gem shop, and showed us a movie about how Thailand's gems are the most beautiful and then tried to sell us a bunch of ruby and sapphire jewelery...yeah I didn't buy anything. lol
I went over to Khao San Rd because it is supposedly what backpacker tourists are into, but it wasn't that great. Maybe if I was into knock-off shopping and drinking at pubs with other random tourist...but I'm not. I did find a stand that was selling Santa Cruz t-shirts. Haha. And I also found a cool used book store to buy some books :-)
After that I tried to walk to the Sky Train to get back to my hotel but I got throughly lost and finally gave up and took a motorbike taxi to the Sky Train station. Sooo much better than sitting in the traffic that is EVERYWHERE in Bangkok. It literally took 2 hrs to get to the Royal Palace this morning that is like 2-3 miles away maybe? Gaah.
Time running out on my internet meter!
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